


Romance. Rebellion. Revolution.

by whitesilverandmercury



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin
Genre: M/M, Multi, best friend's sibling au, early wwi au, pre-bolshevik au, pre-russian revolution au, russian empire au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:53:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2322845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitesilverandmercury/pseuds/whitesilverandmercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The days before the Revolution are full of glamour, glory, and the stately disease of denial. “Love,” Levi echoes, lip curled. Love, which leads esteemed husbands astray and creates bastards and kills forgotten wives. “Yes.” Erwin looks at him, eyes dark, a confident smile both soft and haunting on his mouth. Deny me, I dare you, that smile says. “Love,” he repeats. Eren pops his head over a coral-kissed rock, pockets full of damp sand and leaking ocean water. The knees of his one-piece sailor suit are stained. His face is full of sunshine; his cheeks are dimpled. He claps his hands, he gasps excitedly, “Are you two getting married, too?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Romance. Rebellion. Revolution.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sihaiya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sihaiya/gifts).



The days before the Revolution are full of glamour, glory, and the stately disease of denial.

The Romanovs are still in power and Russia is richer than ever before. Trade is booming. Freedom fighters and terrorists are, for the time being, inactive or still consigned to plotting revolution and new political futures in unknown smoky rooms.

The year is 1907 and the Baltic Fleet may be gone but liberals are hopeful, the economy is flourishing, the Silver Age is thriving, conservative nobility clashes with the vibrant, daring ensigns of the defiant new generation and the world has never been more colorful, more cosmopolitan, more chaotic.

In Crimea, the _cotton_ season has drawn to a close. The _velvet_ is arriving—imperial families, nobility and court officers, painters, poets, dilettanti, musicians. Crimea is full of vineyards and roses, silvery branches and juicy fruit. The villas and ragged peaks bake in the sun; the wind comes in salty and pure off the Black Sea.   

Like the grand resorts on the shores of Brighton or Venice’s Lido, Crimea is a seasonal vacation.

These are the parts of Levi’s childhood that shine, shine, shine.

Like reflections of sunlight flashing off mirrors and glass, filling great pastel-swallowed rooms in seaside mansions. Like mushroom hunting and picnicking on rocky beaches, sailing, fishing, hunting, horseback riding with Tatar grooms guiding the way. 

In this pagan sun-dried place perched in cottages and villas above the water, there are informal parties and dinners free from the stifling etiquette and gloomy fog of St Petersburg. There is laughter; there is conversation; there are pearls and opium pipes and distracted frivolous parents who wrinkle their noses and succumb to real honesty about politics and war the way they wouldn’t for the sake of appearance back at home.

Levi does not care about the Russo-Japanese War; it’s over and that’s that. He is quickly bored of gossip over the Mad Monk, he is not interested in marriage politics, the younger cousins annoy him and so do his hungover parents, and the _nianias_ still look at him funny because he is that precarious age halfway between child and adult. He is sixteen and he is perfectly content on his own reading a book under the shade of a fig tree or exploring the forest where barbarian locals hunt and farm or enjoying secret time with Erwin.

More or less, the constantly-watching _nianias_ make it very difficult to break away for secret time with Erwin.

Closed in a boudoir, sneaking through an unlit salon, tangled fingers and breathless kisses. Chaste, curious, experimental. Smell of wine and tobacco smoke, eyelashes that tickle his cheek as Levi chuckles through his teeth and tilts his head back in the shadows, gripping a velvet drapery as Erwin’s fingers prance down his buttoned front and into his pants.

 _Nianias_ knock and knock and knock at the double doors when Erwin and Levi have dragged a lacquered hand-painted trunk to block entry so they can explore each other without interruption on a four-poster bed, lazy kisses, leisurely gasps, rolling hips and open mouths between knees and penetrating fingers, a thin cotton shirt lying open on flushed skin and hard nipples.

Erwin enchants Levi.

(And then Erwin starts talking about politics and war and Rasputin, too, and Levi knows it’s habits he’s picked up from his father so he cannot resent him, just kiss him, bite him, growl at him through his teeth like an animal so that Erwin shuts up about it, laughs, kisses him like there is no other use meant for his mouth at all. All right, except for maybe _that other thing_ …)

On a rather blustery yet sun-bleached afternoon, Levi goes with Erwin to a less-frequented corner of the shore where the rocks are gunmetal gray and jagged, like teeth, the earth is opening up to swallow them, tide pools are full of shells and other bizarre creatures.

Little Eren comes along at Erwin’s father’s request, holding confidently to Erwin’s hand.

They take their shoes off, ripping apart the eye-and-hook buttons, rolling up their dark trousers and jumping from little boulder to little boulder with their hats and kid gloves forgotten with their socks. They scrape their toes. The sun warms their blue-striped seaside shirts.

While Eren monkeys down to a place where the waves stroke the packed sand gently enough for him to splash and dance, Levi sits with Erwin to collect small pebbles and stones and dip them in candlewax. They glint in the Crimean sun like embers in their palms.

Erwin says, “My father is marrying another woman.”

Levi rolls a pebble from one palm to the other, raising his brows. “But your mother just died.”

Erwin points, shrugging. He squints through the sun, his lashes little wisps of gold as his eyes burn through them like blue fire. He speaks flatly, but not without feeling. “She wasn’t Eren’s mother.”

Levi drops the waxy pebble and looks to Erwin sharply. Erwin’s mother wasn’t Eren’s mother…?

Eren is only four. He is tiny and soft and nimble, jumping through the waves. He has the richest chestnut hair, the perfect little face—bright amber eyes, so large and evocative, an expressive mouth and a round nose. His teeth are like little pearls. His ears are pierced. He is innocence. He is light. He is a bastard.

Levi remembers the funeral, the grand wake with the Fleurs de Nice bouquets and crushed velvet, black veils, black gowns, black shoes, Erwin’s mother lying on display with jewels on her eyes for days. Levi remembers Erwin’s father, shoulders broadened by the epaulettes of the Horse Guards, mustache shielding the heartbroken twist to his mouth. Erwin’s father is a smart, cultured, well-bred man whose line can be traced to the Muscovy of old Kiev. He is tall; he is strong; his eyes are beady but loving behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. He believes the Duma is an interesting prospect, but he still puts all his trust in the monarchy—what noble family would not? At the funeral, the _niania_ had Eren on her hip, three years old and quite confused. The procession to the cemetery was led by white horses.

After the funeral, Erwin became like Eren’s mother. He took her place, in essence. It is sweet and touching to Levi. But the real story has recently been spreading like wildfire over high society dinner dates and strolls down Nevsky Prospekt: Erwin’s father was in love with a gypsy woman. Now that his German wife was gone, the bohemian lover was moving into the large St Petersburg manor with him and his sons. One of whom is apparently actually her son.     

“My grandmother is infuriated,” Erwin says, leaving that dreary topic for the excitement of marriage as he evaluates some pebbles to dip in the wax. “But my grandfather told me, ‘I always taught your father not to let love go when he finds it.’”

“ _Love_ ,” Levi echoes, lip curled. Love, which leads esteemed husbands astray and creates bastards and kills forgotten wives.

“Yes.” Erwin looks at him, eyes dark, a confident smile both soft and haunting on his mouth. _Deny me, I dare you_ , that smile says. There is a shadow in his stare and it is either affection or sharp, distilled desire.

“ _Love_ ,” he repeats.

Levi blushes. He throws a rock at Erwin. Erwin laughs and Levi melts inside.

Yes, things come full circle here. 1903 at the Winter Palace ball was where Levi first fell in love with Erwin, twelve years old and utterly smitten, red-faced, stammering, flustered like an idiot by this fellow princeling all dolled up and on procession with the rest of them, smiling at him like he mattered, talking to him like he understood him. Now there is also this summer day here in 1907, looking at Erwin and feeling the tragedy and hope that intermingled in every fiber of his being. _Erwin_. German name. Means _warrior_. And Erwin is a warrior; Erwin is intrepid and charming, brooding and urbane, and Levi kisses him in the Crimean sun, as the seaside breeze blows through their hair, their collars, tickles their naked feet.

Eren pops his head over a coral-kissed rock, pockets full of damp sand and leaking ocean water. The knees of his one-piece sailor suit are stained. His face is full of sunshine; his cheeks are dimpled. He claps his hands, he gasps excitedly, “Are you two getting married, too?”

Erwin laughs. Levi chokes on a breath. His heart stops. Erwin is not so startled and afraid. Erwin holds his hands out. “Come here, _Reyochka_ ,” he singsongs, and Eren clambers onto his older brother’s lap, giggling, squirming, squealing as Erwin covers him with kisses.

“Brother! Brother! Stop!”

“And will you be the page boy, Eren?”

Levi snaps. He jerks away from Erwin and his precious half-brother; he is flustered and uncomfortable perhaps only because he is flattered, he is overwhelmed, he is afraid of feeling this in love and being this loved because he knows very well there will never be a wedding. He never _expected_ there to be a wedding. But it hurts, just a little, to have it rubbed in his face he is a man who loves men and for all his life he will be struggling to swim against society’s vicious currents.

“Lover, where are you going?” Erwin calls over his shoulder as Levi angrily snatches up his clothes.

Levi cuts him a glance, eyes narrowed. “ _Erwin_ ,” he says, pointedly. Erwin is treading dangerous waters, flaunting their secret so openly before his little innocent brother. And yet in all the anger and indignation…Levi is still guiltily titillated.

They walk back to the villas carrying their limp shoes and each holding one of Eren’s hands; he skips between them, singing a gypsy song.

He learned it from his mother.

Maybe he will sing it at the wedding, too.

* * *

Romance, revolution, rebelliousness.

It is a trifecta.

Eren understands he is a thorn in the family’s side. His cold, disparaging grandmother will not let him forget it even for an afternoon.

She hates that he refuses to attend the Military Academy; she despises his adventures with Erwin to feed the poor, or the fact that he speeds along the Nevsky in his father’s automobile; she belittles his love for mythology and literature and psychology, condemns him for his alternative passions and his unconditional support for their cousin Hanji’s bold revolt against jewels and gowns, her aspirations of becoming a surgeon. His grandmother has in her brittle, persnickety senility campaigned more than once for him to be disowned. She complains endlessly about his inattentiveness to nineteenth-century tradition, like combing his hair or buttoning his shirt to the collar, and his and his mother’s gregarious love for the new age.

But that’s the thing about being a scandal; nothing he can do can do all that much harm to his reputation, because he is already _the half-brother_ , _the bastard_ , _the unfair heir to a massive wealth_ , and hey, at least he isn’t German, right?

It is early 1916 and Russia is finally involved in the war. Millions of soldiers are dead, too full of pride and too empty of real training. The nobility send care packages and some move to the front, offering charity and medical aid. The rest close up their windows, lock up their doors, and retreat. They follow the Empress’s lead. They pretend not to know what is really going on outside the beautiful stone and canals of St Petersburg. A revolution will follow. The Empire will fall. But right now, spirits are still high. Foolishly, hope remains. The Romanovs are questionable, but now that the Russians have been in the battlefield, this war is already half won!

In a Bohemian paradise along one of the granite embankments, a fashionable European coffee shop by day and utter party by night, Eren dances on the table with an ash-blond gypsy named Jean.

His cousin Hanji introduced him to this place. There is a guilty fascination with gypsies lately; their folksy nature seems to comfort a Russia feeling quite suffocated by Western influence. Another blond and a freckled man, they clap along and stomp their feet and laughter and shouts and shrill, fast-paced strings fill the little room. Tapestries hang; smoke hovers. The trill of the instruments pulls at the soul and the drums beat in time with the bass chord of life. The light in this room swells in the fog-drenched night.

“ _Kalinka, kalinka, kalinka moya! V sadu yagoda malinka, malinka moya!_ ”

Jump, kick, clap, _hey!_ Stomping, squatting, the legs are burning and the lungs are burning and the drinks burn the best going down the tongue. The table shudders under the fierce tapping of their feet—heel, toe, heel, toe—arms crossed and hips swaying.

“ _Oh, swing, sway! Oh, swing, sway! Lay me down to sleep!_ ”

This gypsy Jean takes his hands off Eren’s hips and snatches the freckled one, kisses him full on the mouth, tongue curling in the space between their lips as they pop apart. There is a roar through the crowd, laughter, cheers, jeers, shouts of well-tended shock. Eren claps. He claps, he’s dizzy, he sees Levi.

 _Levi_.

Levi, in the back of the hazy crowd, near the door. Levi, in his fine tailored longcoat with his hair slicked back. Levi, utterly still and quiet, like a ghost, but there is a smile on his mouth, and his narrowed gray eyes do not waver from Eren. He smokes a cigarette.

Eren jumps the last jump with this reckless Jean fellow; the music ends with a triumphant shriek of strings. Everyone is so loud and joyous. Levi parts his way through the swarming bodies to the table. Surely there are painters and writers and actors he knows in this crowd. The gold chain on his waistcoat screams a night at the Mariinsky.

Levi holds a hand out, leather glove, family rings. He raises his lovely silken voice over the rowdy noise, the happy tumult. He inquires, “To what offense made by your _babushka_ do we owe this show tonight, _Reyochka_?”

He uses Eren’s nickname; ah, Eren shivers inside when Levi uses his nickname. Laughing, out of breath, dazzled by the drink and the dance, Eren takes Levi’s hand and shimmies off the table. One of the gypsies throws him his coat. He does not need it; he is flushed and still tingling with excitement.

“She yelled at me,” Eren says out in the cold icy night on the embankment, coat thrown over his shoulder like a royal cloak. Levi offers him the rest of his cigarette. His ears ring out here where there is no gypsy party. He still feels like prancing. The absinthe is English, of course; English is all the rage right now.

“I gathered as much. Erwin said you stormed out in a fit.”

“She found out I stopped by one of those receptions on Gorokhovaya Street—”

“Christ, Eren—”

“I know Grandmama hates Rasputin, but I was _curious!_ I left once I realized it was practically an orgy.”

Levi throws his head back and laughs. It is a magnificent sound. It is one more Roman nail sealing Eren to his fate. It is a jarring thing, to be so keenly aware of the moments love strikes.

Ah, yes, right, never mind the heretic erotomaniac Mad Monk, if his _babushka_ ever found out that Eren is irreparably, indiscriminately, inescapably in love with his brother’s good friend Levi, why, she would denounce him until her tongue fell off and her lungs gave out.

 _Levi_.

Erwin is the world and Levi is the moon which shadows him. For as long as Eren can remember, Levi has been at his brother’s side. There is no Erwin without Levi. There is no Levi without Erwin. Everyone knows this. Everyone accommodates this. Erwin graduated from the Military Academy with high honors; Levi attended a foreign university and is deeply entrenched in the lasting upheaval of tradition by poetry and art. Levi spends more time in his personal apartments in Erwin’s inherited mansion than in his own family home.

Eren doesn’t mind.

Eren spends more time in Erwin’s home than in their father’s home, lately, too, after all.

He knows Levi’s apartments intimately in the dark. Levi knows Eren intimately in the dark. There are coals still glowing under the mantle with its black walnut woodwork and chipped golden cherubs. They do not touch the new electric lights. They fumble through the half-dark together, floorboards creaking under shined boots. Eren almost trips on the imported rug. Levi looks ready to eat him in one bite, in a flood of moonlight from open curtains, his shirt undone and his eyes hooded, hungry, heated.

“Love me like you love my brother,” Eren begs, voice cracking. He knows it’s a dirty trick, he knows it’s horrible of him, but he can’t help it. He burns for Levi. He wants Levi to take him with no qualms.

Naked from the waist up, Levi chases him onto the bed. Eren is panting already; he can feel the bruise of Levi’s biting kisses, lingering on his lips. He wants his teeth on his throat. He wants his hands in his hair. He wants his sex, burning inside him. He is drunk and he is utterly in love.

“I adore you, you precious little imp, you nympho, you reckless thoughtless _enfant terrible_ ,” Levi moans through his teeth. It is almost a growl. It gives Eren chills.

The lovemaking is at once violent and tender. There is a wanton impatience in their shared breaths, their desperate kisses, grasping hands and bucking hips. Their skin is one; their bones are one; their souls are one. Eren is a trembling mess of devotion and Levi draws the worship out on his tongue, swallows it in his mewling gasps. Penetration is pure; it is alchemy. It is holy union.

Levi milks the pleasure out of him with a tight, deft hand. The heat of lust pools in his gut. His heart flutters in his throat. He whimpers. He pleas. He utters a guttural groan that is a bit less emasculating and clings so fiercely to Levi, he leaves scratches from his nails down his naked shoulder blades.

The bed thuds against the paneled French embossed walls.

“ _Ah—ah—Levi—nngh—_ ”

“ _Shh… Eren… Ungh, shh, Reyochka, be quieter_ …”

The icons of the Virgin and Saint Sebastian and Saint Peter watch from the red corner, not entirely ashamed.

Levi’s release oozes down his thigh, tacky and cooling too fast.

* * *

Someone is speaking.

A whisper, a low secretive tone. Careful, sweet, but urgent. He hears his name. He hears Levi’s name. Is it a prayer? It isn’t morning. There shouldn’t be a servant in here at this hour. It’s cold. Eren wriggles closer to Levi, seeking his body heat. He is in only his shirt. His insides are sore. He can still smell their sex, rich and heady. He is dizzy. He hasn’t even slept off half the alcohol he consumed.

Eren pries his eyes open, a flutter of lashes.

There is a silhouette hovering over Levi’s side of the bed. Eren knows this shape—the shoulders, the arms, the warmth of the presence, the face ducked close, becoming one with Levi’s shadow. There is the sound of a very soft kiss.

“Erwin…” Eren breathes, reaching.

Levi throws the covers back and, like he usually does, rips himself from the middle of the brothers. His energy is sharp. He moves without a word to dress; he lights an oil lamp and kicks a traveling case out from under the bed.

Erwin is already dressed. Thick sweater, heavy coat.

“What’s going on?” Eren mumbles, pointing to his pants. Erwin goes to fetch them.

“We’re leaving,” Levi cuts from across his apartments, washing his face in the mirror.

“What?” Eren snaps.

Erwin hands him his trousers and takes him by the head, hot strong hands on his ears and skull. He pulls him forward, kisses his forehead. He says, “We’re going down south to Yalta, perhaps after that to Paris. Come on, Papa and Carla will follow this weekend. Let’s go.”

Eren has a creeping sense of unease. It may be because he was jerked awake so cruelly. He can feel his brother picking him apart with his eyes, seeing the things he did with Levi as if they are written on his skin. Eren tries not to blush, imagining himself and Levi in his brother’s mind. He washes; he gets dressed. He knows Erwin does not think he’s looking, but he is, through the mirror, he is looking as Erwin pulls Levi close in that romantic way of his, whispering in his ear, gripping his arms. He blushes again, imagining his brother and Levi this time, in the same tight carnal tangle, the same knot of pain and pleasure—

Eren turns around with a scrape of his heel on the floor. Erwin and Levi break away from each other.

“Why are we going?” Eren demands.

Erwin clears his throat. He explains, reluctantly, “There are whispers. It’s not safe here right now. The war is not going the way we hoped, there is a lot of pressure on the Duma and the Emperor…”  

Eren rubs at his face, trying to process this. Levi will not look either of them in the eye.

Erwin touches Levi’s elbow. He holds his hand out for Eren to come closer; after so many years, merely the gesture calms Eren’s nerves.

“It’s all right,” Erwin murmurs. “We’ll be fine down south for a while. We’ll be fine, and we’ll be _together_.”

* * *

 

**_end._ **

**Author's Note:**

> from tumblr, random au prompt #21 "best friend's sibling au" :) for sihaiya, the lovely thing, i'm so sorry i'm sure you didn't expect this but hnnn i have issues okay thank you for the wonderful prompt!! 
> 
> **romanovs** \- the last family of "tsars"  
>  **crimea** \- a hot season holiday spot for russian nobility and royalty, peninsula south of ukraine  
>  **crimea's "cotton" vs "velvet" season** \- the "cotton" were working class vacationers; the "velvet" were high society  
>  **"mad monk"** \- grigori rasputin, the "faith healer" and controversial private adviser to romanov family; to speak ill of him earned great condemnation from the empress, who believed he was healing her son  
>  **niania(s)** \- a nanny, though about this time english governesses were flocking to st petersburg and starting to take over this role completely  
>  **horse guards** \- russian imperial guards  
>  **fleurs de nice** \- flowers imported from nice, france  
>  **muscovy (of old kiev)** \- the founding dynasty, one could say, of russia (kiev was old/first capital, today located in ukraine)  
>  **duma** \- in essence, russian parliament, created by tsar to better balance power at the demand of revolutionaries  
>  **nevsky prospekt** \- "main street" of st petersburg  
>  **reyochka** \- a made-up diminutive (affectionate nickname) for "eren"  
>  **page boy** \- basically, the ring bearer  
>  **1916** \- by this time, russia was really feeling the reality of the war, as well as the reality of stirring revolution; by the end of this year, rasputin was assassinated and soviets (groups of workers, peasants, soldiers) began protesting publicly, including riots and random shootouts, waving red flags proclaiming "down with the tsar, down with the german empress, all power to the duma"; the tsar (and his family) were abdicated in early 1917, and killed in 1918  
>  **kalinka** \- "cranberry," one of the most popular russian folk songs  
>  **mariinsky** \- a very popular theatre  
>  **babushka** \- grandma  
>  **gorokhovaya street** \- the street of rasputin's residence, where he would sometimes hold open "receptions" preaching his "heretic philosophies" such as you must first sin in all ways and then ask (and earn) redemption  
>  **silver age** \- an age of russian literature/art/poetry  
>  **enfant terrible** \- french for "terrible child," basically unorthodox, someone who "thumbs their nose" at the establishment (norms)  
>  **(going to) yalta** \- resort city in crimea; with distrust in the emperor mounting and much strife between the emperor and the duma, some nobility/royalty began to leave to wait out the tension, or so they imagined


End file.
